Last week’s mail brought an advance copy of “The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption and the Children of War in Vietnam” by Wilmington author Dana Sachs, to be released April 30 by Boston’s venerable Beacon Press.

(That date, incidentally, is not coincidental. April 30 will be the 35th anniversary of the fall or “liberation” of Saigon — depending on one’s point of view — and the end of the Vietnam War.)

I know Sachs has been laboring over this book for years, so its arrival will be much-anticipated.

A native of the Memphis, Tenn., area, Sachs earned her MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for what became her first book, “The House on Dream Street,” a memoir of her days as a university student and English teacher in postwar Vietnam. “House on Dream Street” was the first selection of Wilmington’s “One Book, One Community” campaign back in 2005..

Sachs also wrote “If You Lived Here,” a 2007 novel about a Wilmington women seeking to adopt a baby in Vietnam and the Vietnamese emigre who confronts old ghosts while trying to help her. In addition, she’s translated a number of Vietnamese fairy tales, many of which are in the hard-to-find collection “Two Cakes Fit for a King,” published in 2003 by the University of Hawaii Press.

“The Life We Were Given” is also about Vientam and adoption, though it’s non-fiction. Its subject: “Operation Babylift,” a concerted effort by adoption agencies, loading nearly 3,000 Vietnamese children on any aircraft that were available and ferrying them out of the country — and mainly to the U.S.A. — as the South Vietnamese army and government collapsed.

It was a well-intended move. The organizers, and certainly most Americans, thought they were “saving” these orphans from Communism. Almost all the 3,000 Vietnamese youngsters found loving homes in the States and live today as prosperous U.S. citizens in their 30s and 40s.

Sachs, however, found a few ambiguities in the system. For one thing, Operation Babylift, more or less deliberately, left behind tens of thousands of mixed-race children, the offspring of liaisons between U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese women. These children were frequently treated as pariahs in postwar Vietnam.

Moreover, not all the “orphans” were orphans (which is why I used the quotation marks in the title of this post). Many of the youngsters had parents who had turned their children over to orphanages or care centers during the chaos of the last days of the war, with the explicit understanding that they would return to claim them as soon as things calmed down.

Some of the Babylift orphans were later able to contact their Vietnamese parents. Many others, however, never learned their original names and have no idea what their actual birth dates or birthplaces are. Sachs gently reminds us what the road to Hell is paved with and that even the highest aspirations are sometimes clouded by all-too-human motives.

Note; Sachs will have a homecoming signing a 7 p.m. April 6 in Room 1008 of the CIS building on the UNCW campus. She’ll be on a whirlwind tourthat will take her to Yale University, The Smithsonian in Washington, Vassar College and to a conferenced of Babylift alumni in New Jersey.

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About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.